Women who took on the Mafia

The author writes this, in between a passage describing a grandmother who mimed strangling Pesce and another that describes a mother who no longer referred to her by name.

There is an attempt to give a women’s liberation angle to this story; that independence from men is somehow the cure; but being part of a criminal family is something very specific relative to the general question of women’s place in society, or in Italian society, or even in Calabria.